WORK TRUCKS HIT THE STAGE

March 16, 2011 Vol. 7, No. 6

Highlights weren’t in short supply at last week’s Work Truck Show, which seems to grow every year. It’s certainly been drawing a progressively larger press contingent, which isn’t a bad indicator of success and consequence. And while I haven’t done a count, it seems to me that there were more product introductions — ‘big’ products, I mean — this year than ever before.

Truck introductions included the new Western Star 4700, a good looking vocational beast small enough for lots of municipal and construction applications. And very body-builder friendly. I especially like its approach to electrics, including its dedicated wiring raceway, an easily accessed routing path through the cab floor that’s said to provide plenty of room for body builders to route wiring more efficiently.

A new Freightliner severe-duty plow also made the scene, the 114SD platform equipped with an elliptical dump body, front plow, and belly scraper on a  set-forward-axle configuration with ground clearance package.

Navistar unveiled the International TerraStar 4×4 medium-duty truck. Launched in 4×2 form last year, the 4×4 variant also gets International’s 300-hp, 6.4-liter MaxxForce 7 V-8 engine,

And then there was a trio of medium-duty cabovers which I’ll get to in a minute, plus a new parallel hybrid propulsion system for class 6, 7, and 8 vocational trucks from BAE Systems.

THE BUSY SHOW, produced by the National Truck Equipment Association (NTEA) and aligned with its 47th annual convention, took over the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis from Tuesday to Thursday last week. It was preceded by the Green Truck Summit on Monday through Tuesday morning, jointly presented by the NTEA and CALSTART.

Amongst this year’s intros was a particularly significant one, namely Hino’s new model 155 and 195 cabovers. That significance wasn’t so much about the trucks themselves, good as they seem to be on the face of it, but because this was the first time the company has launched a new product outside Japan. That’s no small thing, and seemingly the entire Hino executive team was on hand for the smoke and mirrors.

Ironically, given the stunning tragedies that befell Japan just a couple of days later, two of the other major Work Truck Show introductions also involved new Japanese medium-duty trucks, from Mitsubishi Fuso and Isuzu. Important as those trucks are to their respective companies and to the market, exciting as it is to see new hardware hit the street, it all seems very small in the face of what Japan is dealing with now. I can only wish these companies and the Japanese people at large a swift recovery.

HINO’S CABOVER IS BACK, much to the pleasure of some tow-truck operators in Quebec and elsewhere who bemoaned its disappearance a few years ago with fairly serious passion. Hino says this one was designed from the ground up for North America.